UK prime minister David Cameron has agreed with Scotland’s first minister Alex Salmond on the terms of a referendum, to be held in Scotland in autumn 2014, as to whether Scotland should seek independence or remain part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

With a newly elected sovereigntist government in the French-speaking province of Québec in Canada, and with the separatist-minded Basque Country set for regional elections this Sunday and the even more separatist-minded Catalunya going to regional polls next month, regional autonomy seems to be mounting somewhat of a comeback on both sides of the Atlantic.

Under today’s ‘Edinburgh agreement’ between Salmond and Cameron, Scottish voters will have the opportunity to vote for independence, ending 305 years as a single nation united with England after the 1707 Act of Union.

The agreement marks a tactical victory for both Salmond and Cameron. Salmond, who had hoped to put off the referendum indefinitely and perhaps beyond the next scheduled general election in 2015, will nonetheless get a delay for nearly two years to make his case for independence, and 16- and 17-year olds will be permitted to vote as well (so 14-year-old Scots, start following Suffragio now).

For his part, Cameron will have succeeded in getting a straight up-and-down vote on the independence question, not a multiple-question referendum on greater autonomy for Scotland, which polls show would be much more likely to succeed than full independence.

Salmond, who is Scotland’s ‘first minister’ — the leader of the regional Scottish government — and whose Scottish National Party in 2011 secured the largest mandate of any regional Scottish election since the 1998 devolution established the Scottish parliament, will lead the campaign for the ‘yes’ vote.

Cameron, the Tory prime minister who won just one seat and a grand total of 16.7% in the 2010 general election in Scotland (finishing last among the four major parties), will lead the campaign for the ‘no’ vote, but he will certainly be joined by Labour leader Ed Miliband and Liberal Democratic leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, whose party serves in the United Kingdom’s governing coalition with the Tories. Since the days of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who tried to use Scotland in 1989 as a testing ground for the much-derided ‘poll tax’ that was set to apply nationwide in 1990, Scotland has greeted the Tories with antipathy. So it’s not without some legitimacy that Miliband has argued that only Labour can keep Scotland in the United Kingdom.

As Alex Massie writes for The Spectator, in calling the entire ‘phony war’ leading up to today’s event a queer process (and quite rightly), he notes that Cameron himself, quite a fish out of water in Scotland, may lose the general election currently scheduled for May 2015:

David Cameron slinks in to Scotland almost as though he were the leader of a foreign country already. You would not think he’s merely visiting territory for which he presently holds some responsibility. The optics – as the media handlers say – will favour Mr Salmond today. Why, there will even be signing and swapping of papers further bolstering the impression this is a meeting of equals….

The difficulty is that it is not yet clear what a No vote actually means. It will not necessarily settle the matter, not least since the Prime Minister is on record as being open to “more powers” for Holyrood after the referendum.

That, however, is a discussion upon which he may have little influence. The next Westminster election must be held just six months or so after Scotland’s referendum. David Cameron may – just may – not win that election. Which means that at some point we will need to know what Ed Miliband thinks about Scotland too. What a happy thought that is!

On the surface, then, Salmond seems well placed in the next 24 months to turn around polling data that shows, on a straight ‘union vs. independence’ referendum, Scots support union (as of an Oct. 8 TNS-MRNB poll) by a 53% margin, to just 28% in favor of breaking from the United Kingdom.

Scotland, under Labour prime minister Tony Blair’s devolution policy for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, achieved its own parliament after a successful 1997 referendum, and the Scottish parliament came into being in 1998. The parliament, informally known as Holyrood, the name of the Edinburgh neighborhood in which it is located, is a 129-member unicameral legislature, essentially shares legislation power with the UK parliament in Westminster.

Cameron’s victory in the ‘Edinburgh agreement’ was to limit the options to strictly independence or remaining in the union, rather than allowing for a ‘devomax’ option — maximum devolution that would provide the Scottish parliament even more powers currently reserved for Westminster. Indeed, Cameron seemed to dangle the possibility of further devolution earlier Tuesday in his remarks on the agreement:

Mr Cameron said: “All those who want to see not only the status quo but further devolution from the United Kingdom to Scotland must vote to stay within the United Kingdom. Then it’ll be for all the parties to decide what proposals to put forward, but I’ve always taken the view we have to answer this prior question first. We have to answer the question: does Scotland want to stay in the United Kingdom? If the answer is Yes we do want to stay in the United Kingdom, then obviously further devolution is possible.”

UK prime minister David Cameron stopped by The David Letterman Show (a popular late night show in the United States, for non-US readers), and flubbed a few questions.

Notably, Cameron couldn’t name who composed Rule Britannia (Thomas Arne wrote the music — not Edward Elgar, as Cameron suggested — and James Thompson wrote the poem upon which it is based) and he couldn’t translate Magna Carta (it means, “The Great Charter”). Magna Carta was the 1215 charter that limited the powers of the English monarchy and set forth certain liberties for certain English nobles — it became the foundation for much of the following English, British and American liberties, including the U.S. Bill of Rights.

By the end of it, it was clear that Letterman’s “dumb American questions” were a joke at Cameron’s expense. He took the jibe well, however, and joked, “You have found me out. That is bad, I have ended my career on your show tonight.”

British media are having a poke at the prime minister today, but it’s not likely to cause Cameron any lasting harm — indeed, it may have stepped on the attention from the media to the speech of Liberal Democratic leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg at the Liberal Democratic Party conference this week.

As conference season gets underway in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party, under relatively new leader Ed Miliband, now leads the Conservative Party by a 41% to 31% advantage in the latest Guardian/ICM poll, with the Liberal Democrats trailing at 14%.

Labour, which performed generally better than expected in the last election in May 2010 (which was supposed to have been a complete landslide for the Tories), hold 254 seats in the House of Commons to 304 seats for the Tories and 57 seats for the Lib Dems. Although the next election is not expected until 2015, and the current Tory-Lib Dem coalition shows no signs of fracturing, despite some strains, Labour would be set to return to government. That’s the best poll performance for Labour since well before the era of former prime minister Gordon Brown.

The support comes largely from the drop in support for the Lib Dems, who won 22% in the 2010 election and have watched support crumble as the junior partner of UK prime minister David Cameron’s government. Just last week, Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg (pictured above) recorded an apology for violating its 2010 pledge not to raise tuition fees — the Tory/Lib Dem coalition has voted to lift the cap on tuition fees to £9,000.

The move, which came in advance of this week’s annual Lib Dem conference, has dominated political discussion — Clegg’s video has even gone viral:

As we approach the expected 2015 election, if Lib Dem support remains subdued, the calls for a new leader will only become louder. This week’s favorite is Vince Cable, who has been the business secretary in the coalition cabinet since 2010. That’s perhaps ironic, given that Cable is just as pregnant with support for the central Tory program of budget cuts as Clegg. Nonetheless, the Guardian/ICM poll showed that the Cable-led Lib Dems would increase their support to 19% from 14%.

Throughout the conference, Cable and Clegg have both emphasized that the Lib Dems will run in the next election as a separate party, not jointly with the Tories or in favor of any particular coalition.

All things considered, today’s polls are of limited utility nearly 30 months before the next election. Furthermore, I still think — despite a strong performance by shadow chancellor Ed Balls and an increasingly sure footing for Ed Miliband — that the polls are a reflection less of Miliband’s stellar leadership than of the collapse of the Lib Dems under Clegg and the tepid reviews of Cameron’s Tories, given the austerity program that chancellor David Osborne is pushing forward with, even with the UK mired in a double-dip recession. So there’s much time for the economy to turn around, and if so, Cameron and Clegg will both in better shape going into an election expected in 2015, and Miliband still seems like (and remains closer to) Neil Kinnock, the perennial loser of the 1980s and 1990s British politics than to Tony Blair, who delivered three consecutive Labour routs.

The left has savaged Clegg because he refused to apologize for the actual hike in tuition fees (and not just for breaking the pledge), but the more damning criticism is that by offering up such a mealy-mouthed apology and by refusing to stand up to the Tories on not just student fees, but the direction of the economy, Clegg sounds like just another politician. Given that Clegg’s ascent into government came largely from his freshness and the appeal of a new approach to government (Cleggmania!), that is perhaps the most dangerous aspect for Clegg’s leadership. Continue reading Labour leads, as Clegg and the Lib Dems struggle during UK convention season→

As predicted, justice minister Kenneth Clarke was demoted to ‘minister without portfolio,’ marking what will likely be the end of front-bench politics for the ‘big beast’ of Tory — and British — politics, and for his thoughtful take on prison reform. He’ll be replaced by the far more right-wing (and non-lawyer) Chris Grayling, an up and coming figure on the Tory right, who had previously served as employment minister. From The Guardian:

Grayling’s appointment also signals a determination by Cameron to take a tougher line on sentencing, the Human Rights Act, legal aid and community punishment, a nexus of policy issues that has left Conservative backbenchers frustrated by what they regarded as Clarke’s willingness to pander to Lib Dem opinion.

Lady Sayeeda Warsi, the only Muslim in the cabinet and a one-time rising Tory moderate star, was also demoted, from co-chair of the party to senior minister of state at the Foreign Office.

Cameron’s reshuffle among junior ministerial offices was much more thoroughgoing, and also marks a significant swing to the right — and a swing to a cabinet that is ‘more male, white, southern and Oxbrigdge’. The net effect will be to isolate further deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats. Chancellor George Osborne will keep his job, meaning that there’s no shift from the budget austerity upon which Cameron has staked his government’s legacy.

Longtime observers of British politics will note with some alarm recent reports that justice minister Kenneth Clarke may be headed out of UK prime minister David Cameron’s cabinet, pursuant to a widely expected cabinet reshuffle in early September.

To contemplate this is to see the final curtain drawn on one of the ‘big beasts’ of British politics in the past three decades — as has been noted, Clarke won his first ministerial role when UK chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne was just one year old.

The Telegraph reports that Cameron is considering replacing Clarke with Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary (and the ill-fated former leader of the Tories from 2003 to 2005), or Nick Herbert, a junior justice minister. Even more odd is the way in which Clarke has issued a statement on the potential reshuffle:

“I have never had any conversations of any kind with the Prime Minister or anyone acting on his behalf about a reshuffle. I am totally laid back about a reshuffle and am waiting to see whether or not it affects me,” he said.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the latest turn in the Julian Assange drama is why Ecuador — of all places — is so keen on offering Assange asylum.

Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, made public a huge trove of classified cables from the U.S. State Department, starting in February 2010. Assange has also been charged on a warrant by Sweden for sexual assault and voluntarily entered English custody in December 2010.

Assange claims that in Sweden (unlike in the Great Britain), he will be subject to extradition or illegal rendition to the United States, where he also claims he will be charged with espionage and other crimes in relation to the release of the U.S. classified cables. I will leave aside the issue of whether that’s a valid concern or paranoid delusion, but given the global attention now on Assange, it seems certain that the United States would face massive criticism and a significant soft-power blow, even among its allies, for such a move.

In any event, on June 19, Assange fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and Ecuador granted asylum to Assange on August 16. The United Kingdom, for its part, refuses to guarantee the safe passage of Assange, who now faces the puzzle of getting from Ecuador’s embassy out of the country. The United Kingdom apparently sent a letter last week to the Ecuadorian embassy that seemed to threaten invasion of Ecuador’s embassy to reclaim Assange — that would appear to be a fairly significant break with the international law that governs diplomatic relations, which is one of the few areas of international law that countries take seriously as law.

Besides, the idea of UK foreign minister William Hague ordering a military siege in posh Knightsbridge to capture Assange is so outrageous (and hilarious) that I doubt the British government would ever stoop to something like that. Far better to wait it out until Assange tries to flee, or simply strip Ecuador of its diplomatic status by cutting off ties.

But why would Ecuador even bother to step into such a fraught battle of international intrigue that has already become a headache for the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden and Assange’s native country of Australia?

Though we can’t know the Ecuadorian government’s motivation for sure, engineering a high-profile and possibly protracted confrontation with a Western government would actually be quite consistent with Correa’s practice of using excessively confrontational foreign policy in a way that helps cement his populist credibility at home. It would also be consistent with his habit of using foreign embassies as proxies for these showdowns — possibly because they tend to generate lots of Western outrage with little risk of unendurable consequences.

That seems just about right, and it doesn’t hurt that South American ally Argentina already detests the United Kingdom over the status of the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) since the 1982 war and before.

But there’s a vital element missing from this narrative: Correa faces reelection in February 2013.

Hilarious. This is why Boris Johnson won the mayoral election of London initially in 2008 as a Conservative and was reelected in May 2012, despite a strong Labour wind, defeating former London mayor Ken Livingstone by a 3% margin.

Also, forget the goofy one-eyed blobs, Boris is the true mascot of the 2012 Summer Olympics. From the minute we saw him waving the Olympic flag at the end of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, with his jacket opened, signalling London’s much looser approach to the Games (compared to the tightly synchronized Beijing Games), you just knew there would be no other way:

He’s rarely on-message (although he can show discipline when he wants).

He’s a bit of a goofy Etonian toff, floppy hair and all, but he’s probably the UK’s most popular politician today, with the possible exception of Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond.

As I’ve noted, he may one day be a British prime minister, as he certainly has more personality than the entire front bench of the current Tory (well, Coalition) government combined. It’s thought that David Cameron, then just newly enshrined as the new Tory leader, sent Boris off to run for London mayor to get him out of his hair as he plotted the Tories’ own return to Westminster. But given the current trajectory of Cameron’s government (with many blaming George Osborne’s* austerity policies as the main cause of the UK’s double-dip recession), it is not unthinkable that Boris may well lead the Tories in the next general election cycle or two.

Certainly, the exposure from hosting the 2012 Games will do him no harm (especially given that businessman Mitt Romney transformed his leadership of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City into a stint as Massachusetts governor and into the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2012).

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Even on a day when Labour has done amazingly well in local elections across the United Kingdom, Labour leader Ed Miliband can’t seem to get a break, having been hit with an egg in Southampton while otherwise on a bit of a victory tour.

It’s still been a better 24 hours for Miliband than for Conservative prime minister David Cameron, who’s now apologized to his party for the dismal local election result — for what it’s worth (not much), if translated into a general election vote, Labour would have won with 39% to just 31% for the Tories (but ask William Hague how his 1999 win in local elections turned out for his Tories in the 2001 general election).

Labour has taken over 700 council seats from the Tories and from their governing coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, who have had an even worse election than the Tories. Labour has also shined in Wales and in Scotland, which is somewhat of a damper for the nationalist parties as well.

In London, Labour is winning 42% of the vote to just 33% for the Tories, and even the race for mayor is closer than expected — incumbent Boris Johnson is still leading Labour candidate and former mayor Ken Livingstone.

You could probably count any number of reasons why this should not be the case. Johnson’s record as mayor is not incredibly accomplished. He’s presiding over a London that has watched its status as a global financial capital take quite a hit. And he’s just as much of a pampered old Etonian as the current Tory leadership of prime minister David Cameron and chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, who are under fire nationally for their budget cuts program at a time when UK growth is slipping and unemployment is rising.

Livingstone, the first mayor of London, can point to significant success in his time in office from 2000 to 2008. He revamped London’s public transport system, even if his proposed congestion charge proved controversial. He led the way on registry of same-sex couples way back in 2001, long before the UK Civil Partnerships Act in 2004. Livingstone led the campaign to win the Summer Olympics to London, which will be held later this year. He also led the city with calm and dignity in the face of the July 2005 terrorist bombings, while giving voice to many of the anti-war concerns than neither mainstream Labour nor the Tories voiced over the war on terror.

A maverick willing to stand on principle against his own party, Livingstone even found himself kicked out of Tony Blair’s Labour Party for a while for having the audacity to win the 2000 mayoral election without Blair’s blessing (Blair grudgingly readmitted Livingstone after his landslide win in the 2004 mayoral election). There’s a strong case to be made that Livingstone offers better policies, while Boris offers only glib personality. Boris represents a party that now owns the UK’s sluggish economy, but voters trust him nearly 2-to-1 as better for London’s economy. Livingstone has pledged to cut transport costs by 7%, but Johnson still leads on transport issues.

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Just three months ago, the video shown above from yet another EU summit set tongues wagging on both sides of the English Channel: was French President Nicolas Sarkozy so angry with UK Prime Minister David Cameron that he’d brush past his outstretched hand?

Cameron had just exercised the United Kingdom’s first-ever veto of a European Union fiscal treaty that would have brought the EU countries into greater fiscal policy alignment (presumably toward more austerity, as favored by Cameron, Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel). Although the remaining 26 EU countries signed up to a “compact” of the EU countries (sans the UK), the exercise of the veto was very much in keeping with the UK’s longtime role as Europe’s most stubborn citizen, much to the anguish of Sarkozy and the rest of Europe.

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Suffragio attempts to bring thoughtful analysis to the political, economic and other policy issues that are central to countries outside of the US -- to make world politics less foreign to the US audience. Suffragio focuses, in particular, on those countries and regions with upcoming or recent elections.